Watching Facebook's Slow Death Is Getting Embarrassing
Maybe it's time for it to visit that nice farm upstate.
A press release about Meta’s (formerly known as Facebook) new Avatars Store served as a reminder for me of just how far the company has fallen in relevance since its heyday of the early 2010s.
Earlier this week, Meta announced that users will soon be able to buy outfits for their Meta Avatars from brands like Balenciaga, Prada, and Thom Browne. With real money, not Monopoly money or cryptocurrency.
These avatars can represent you across all the Meta properties of Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram, and they’re an attempt by Facebook to entice people to participate in the metaverse, which Facebook is hoping to be a pioneer of, hence the name change. You don’t need to enter the metaverse to use them, however; most people just use them as reaction images on Messenger or Facebook, and by ‘most people’ I mean ‘almost exclusively people over the age of 50’, because nobody else uses Facebook enough to care.
These avatars are Facebook’s response to Bitmojis, which were already considered gauche by the time Facebook announced Avatars. Bitmojis started life as Bitstrips, an app that let users create their own comics where they were the stars. Bitstrips the company was founded in 2007, but Bitmoji, the more-successful spin-off app, was founded in 2014, and both were acquired by Snapchat in 2016.
The mid-to-late 2010s were Peak Bitmoji, which makes it odd that Facebook only introduced their own version in 2019, entering the game relatively late in the piece. Meta hopes that people will use their Avatars to represent them in the metaverse as it prioritises augmented reality and virtual reality integration moving forward, but hoping that people will spend real money on digital designer clothes seems… overly ambitious.
Facebook has fallen incredibly far in most people’s estimation in the past decade. While 2010’s The Social Network certainly didn’t help Zuckerberg’s image, things got particularly bad for the company in the late 2010s thanks to Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation in the 2016 US Presidential election, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the attempted genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
I’m not sure Facebook/Meta has ever really recovered, from a public image standpoint, and it certainly hasn’t tried particularly hard to improve its reputation or make amends, what with Zuckerberg continuing to acquire more and more land in Hawaii against the wishes of locals. And speaking as a user, I’m not sure it’s ever been less relevant than it is right now.
Time for a thought exercise: which social media platform do you spend the most time on? I can already guess how most people will answer, based largely on their ages, but also on how much time they spend online more generally (note: this is very much from my POV as a westerner, and I realise and acknowledge that usage habits are different in the Global South). Millennial and Gen X journalists = Twitter. Zoomers = TikTok. Millennial journalists who try to seem cool = TikTok (hi). The average Millennial = Instagram. Boomers = Facebook. I don’t know what Gen X is doing because I routinely forget they exist, but I assume the older ones spend time on Facebook and the younger ones on Twitter.
There are definitely people across all demographics who still use Facebook regularly — I still see Avid Facebook Posters around, and they never fail to disturb and confuse me — but based on what I’ve observed, many people just use it to invite friends to events. I have close friends who I’m not even friends with on Facebook, and many more who simply don’t have accounts. Facebook Groups tends to be one of the more consistently popular parts of the site, but even then, I think their heyday has been and gone, speaking as someone who created a group in 2016 that now has over 8000 users but is less active than it was when it had less than 4000 a couple of years ago.
Remember the mid-2000s when there were multiple social media platforms vying for everyone’s attention? Then MySpace came out on top and enjoyed its moment in the sun until Facebook stole its crown and suddenly owning a social media platform made you a God with powers equal to that of world leaders and not just a Guy Who Owned A Website.
MySpace’s death felt relatively swift: it reached its peak in April 2008, but by May 2009, Facebook had outstripped it in terms of unique US visitors.
Facebook’s decline, on the other hand, feels extremely protracted and drawn out. It’s not just Facebook, either; Instagram has essentially been turned into an e-commerce platform that can’t decide if it wants to compete with Amazon or TikTok, despite the fact nobody who uses Instagram does so because they wish they could be shopping or making Reels instead (except for brands).
At some point, much of social media stopped feeling enjoyable and started feeling like an obligation, a necessity for participating in modern life. I think a desire to derive more enjoyment from social media is one of the things that has driven TikTok’s rapid rise. Think about it: what is there to enjoy about using Facebook and Instagram anymore? Besides the fact that they may allow you to communicate with loved ones, I’m not sure there is anything. FarmVille isn’t even playable on-site anymore.
Perhaps Zuckerberg thinks that the Metaverse will bring back a sense of enjoyment to his dying social media empire. As someone who has seen many other platforms come and go, I never expected Facebook to last this long, and I think that Facebook’s death makes sense. Rather than continuing to try and innovate something that is, at its core, way past its prime, it would be wiser for Zuckerberg and co to step aside and let others with potentially more interesting ideas and a better understanding of what users want take up the mantle. But that would mean relinquishing power, and what incentive does Zuckerberg have to do that?